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schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags; and here was this wonderful man who could tell you
about the inhabitants of the planets and the bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not
going to be what respectable people imagined. A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically
feasible Wells knew that within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he
himself wanted to be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research in that direction would continue.
On the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a time when the Wright brothers had actually lifted
their machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the generally accepted opinion was that if God had
meant us to fly He would have given us wings. Up to 1914 Wells was in the main a true prophet. In
physical details his vision of the new world has been fulfilled to a surprising extent.
But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class,
he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by
fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious
bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as
sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they
are at any rate ghosts which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best
understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a Fascist
streak in themselves. A crude book like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years ago, is a truer
prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of Things to Come. If one had to
choose among Wells's own contemporaries a writer who could stand towards him as a corrective,
one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to the evil voices of power and military "glory." Kipling
would have understood the appeal of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards
them might be. Wells is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middleclass
novels which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began
again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how much it is,
after all, to have any talents to squander.